Tongue in Cheek

Payne Avenue runs north from Saint Paul's East Side into Payne-Phalen, and Tongue in Cheek has been one of its anchors for years — a New American restaurant with an unusually deep vegan and vegetarian menu, a tasting-menu option, and a bar that has always been more ambitious than the room's storefront exterior suggests. It trades Wednesday through Sunday, daytime into the evening, which makes it one of the few places on this list that works for an early dinner as well as a late one.

The non-alcoholic offering is structured around a named set called The Placebos, spanning several flavour profiles and available as a flight so that a table can taste across the range rather than committing to one glass. Underneath that is the part that matters more: the bar builds to order. Rather than handing a non-drinker a fixed list of three sweet options, the bartenders will construct an entirely alcohol-free drink to a described flavour profile — bitter, herbaceous, sour, whatever is asked for — which is the same service a full-strength guest gets. Visit Saint Paul's guide to drinking without alcohol in the city describes it as a bar that "makes great use of its talented beverage team in building any drink, including those without alcohol." Separately, the bar runs a line of beer cocktails, several of which can be built non-alcoholic; the Passion of Cayenne combines passion fruit, cayenne and jalapeno salt over Athletic Brewing's Upside Dawn golden ale, giving a zero-proof drink with the bitterness and carbonation that make beer cocktails work. This is a licensed restaurant with a full bar, and the non-alcoholic programme is a real but modest part of it rather than the centre — the strength of the offer is the bar team's willingness to build rather than a long printed spirit-free list.